Flu Vaccine Shots Will Be Available This Fall After All

Despite political posturing, missed meetings, and nail-biting moments of medical mystery, it now seems certain that there will be a new and updated flu vaccine this fall.

Given the stats on the 2024-25 flu season, the worst in the US in more than a decade—with an estimated at least 40 million illnesses, 520,000 hospitalizations, and 22,000 deaths—that should have been a no-brainer.

But politics had made it a question.

First, President Trump had withdrawn America from the World Health Organization (WHO), which holds twice-yearly meetings to consider new information about flu viruses via its World Health Organization’s Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, a network of seven collaborating centers and four essential regulatory labs, which are based in the US, UK, Japan, China, Russia, and Australia. Both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Drug Administration were/maybe are members. WHO’s own vaccine recommendations for 2025-26 generally parallel those of the FDA.

Typically, the 17-member FDA vaccine committee would meet next and publicly discuss the recommendation and make its own endorsement, and then the agency would make its final decision. However here at home, while the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee had been scheduled to meet as usual in February to weigh in on the composition of the flu shots, that session was canceled without explanation after Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an outspoken vaccine skeptic, fired the agency’s outside independent virus experts.

By March, the picture had changed. The CDC had indeed gone to the WHO meeting with, or perhaps without, Trump’s permission, and experts from within the FDA, the CDC, and the Department of Defense gathered to go over surveillance data from the US and around the world about flu viruses that are currently circulating.

In June, the FDA released their recommendations.

The rules they released are clear, concise, and welcome.

As CDC epidemiologist Alicia Budd notes, the exact timing of when flu season begins and ends depends on where you live. For example, flu activity generally increases in October and lasts until May in the United States, although it can peak in different regions of the US at different times. It takes two weeks for your body to build the protection the shot offers, and that protection will decline slowly over the next few months, which is why a new shot is required each year.

For the 2025-2026 flu season, the FDA is recommending that flu vaccines be trivalent, which means they will protect against two strains of influenza A and one of influenza B. Their coming so late to the game had raised questions about the sufficiency of the supply, which is to say, would there be enough to provide a shot for everyone who needs and or wants one? One important update is that the vaccine will be free of thimerosal, a potentially carcinogenic preservative already removed from European and American shots, but now formally so. The advisory panel voted, with one abstention, to back the usual US recommendation that nearly everyone age 6 months and older get an annual flu vaccination, and they now believe there will be enough vaccines for all. “FDA anticipates that there will be an adequate and diverse supply of approved trivalent seasonal influenza vaccines for the upcoming virus season,” according to a statement.

In short, absent any future politicking, happily, FDA’s answer was a clear, broad-based “yes,“ and because there had been some concern that the vaccine-skeptic Kennedy might limit the shots, this final memo was greeted with pleasure by former independent members of the committee. “I’m glad that they’ve come out with the influenza recommendation in a timely manner,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the independent advisory committee and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.